Prince Andrew is urged to challenge £12m settlement with sex abuse accuser

Prince Andrew should challenge Virginia Giuffre to return the estimated £12 million settlement she gave him after she claimed he had sex with her three times as a teenager, a leading US lawyer has claimed.

Alan Dershowitz was sued by the victim of Jeffrey Epstein for calling her a liar over her claims that she had been forced to have sex with him.

But in a statement in November, Ms Giuffre admitted that ‘may have made a mistake’ by pointing the finger at Mr. Dershowitz, who denied his claims.

Prince Andrew is said to believe this now raises serious questions about Ms Giuffre’s credibility, despite the fact that she has already settled the case out of court in the US.

Mr. Dershowitz said the daily telegraph that the Duke of York made a ‘mistake’ by not taking the case to trial and should now try to void the agreement.

He said: ‘I have never understood why he agreed to the deal. There were many, many good defenses he could have put up. I’ve thought from the beginning, as soon as the deal was made, it was a mistake to do it. You should seek all legal remedies and the media should fully investigate all allegations because this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He added: ‘I think the media should do a deep investigation to determine the whole truth.

“Everyone should have an interest in getting the truth out, the whole truth about everything, and it’s very important that the media start digging into all the allegations and do their due diligence on it… That’s the thing to do. report, not just one side. of history.’

Sources close to the King said yesterday that Prince Andrew’s attempts to restore his reputation with an eye toward returning to public life are ‘wishful thinking’.

While the King respects that his brother has the right to try to clear his name, any hope that this will pave the way back to official duties and a front-line royal role is “very misguided”, a well-placed source told the newspaper. Mail.

“That is not the King’s thought,” they said.

King Charles is in a delicate position, but he knows that he must act as a monarch, not as a brother.

The source said the problem is “much more” than Andrew’s settlement in the United States with Virginia Roberts over allegations of rape and sexual assault, which he has always denied.

There is frustration in parts of the Royal Household that the embattled prince and his advisers, who recently launched a media blitz to try to turn the tide of public opinion, do not understand this fact.

“Decisions that were previously made about his position within the Royal Family also concern his professional judgment and personal associations,” the source said.

The King is supported by his son and heir, the Prince of Wales.

William also strongly believes that his late grandmother’s decisions to strip her supposed favorite son of his official duties and associations were the right ones.

The late Queen also stripped Andrew of the right to use his title of HRH in public, so that he could fight the case as a ‘private citizen’.

Ms Roberts, now 39 and known by her married name Virginia Giuffre, claimed she was forced to have sex with Andrew when she was 17, after she was trafficked by convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew, 62, denied the allegation, but paid a £12m out-of-court settlement for Ms Roberts to drop the civil suit in the US.

Legal sources close to the prince said he would launch an £81m lawsuit against her if she repeated the accusation in a forthcoming memoir. He has hired Los Angeles attorneys Andrew Brettler and Blair Berk to try to get her to retract her claims and possibly get an apology.

Meanwhile, Mrs Roberts’s friends scorned a bizarre ‘trick’ that was said to disprove her account of her encounter with the Duke of York. A photograph on the front page of the Daily Telegraph on Saturday showed a man and woman lying fully clothed in a bathroom in the former home of convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. They wore masks of the faces of Andrew and the accuser of him.

It was published under the headline: ‘The photo that ‘cleans Duke’ about sex in the bathroom’. Maxwell’s brother, Ian, told the newspaper that the photograph, taken by two of her sister’s acquaintances, refuted Ms Roberts’ account of her sexual encounter with Andrew.

Maxwell said the image ‘shows[s] conclusively that the bathroom is too small for any kind of sexual diversion.’

Ms Roberts claimed that Andrew licked her toes in the bathroom before they had sex in the bedroom in 2001. A source close to Ms Roberts told the Mail on Sunday: “If this embarrassing stunt is what If the better Maxwell’s side can do in defense of Prince Andrew then it’s laughable… It’s a disgusting attempt to discredit a victim of sexual abuse and it would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive.

Also, they have the facts totally wrong. Virginia never said they had sex in the bathroom.

Lisa Bloom, a lawyer who has represented several victims of Epstein and Maxwell, said: “What a surreal and bizarre photograph. It doesn’t prove anything… Virginia said that she and Andrew were in the bathroom. The photo shows that two full size humans can fit in the bathroom.

Lawyers for Ms Roberts declined to comment. Elsewhere, evidence has surfaced that may prove the infamous image of Andrew with his arm around a teenage girl, Ms. Roberts, is real.

The photograph was said to have been taken on March 10, 2001, the night Ms Roberts said Andrew first sexually abused her.

The Mail on Sunday said it could prove the image was printed in a lab an hour away, a two-minute drive from Roberts’ former home in Florida on March 13, 2001, and that it would have been “virtually impossible” to fake it.

Last week, in a television interview from prison, Maxwell said: ‘It’s false. I don’t think it’s real for a second. In 2019, Andrew said that he “didn’t remember” the photo he had taken.